MadWorld Reader Q&A

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The developer answers the questions you submitted.

By Matt Casamassina

SEGA's ultra-violent Wii brawler, MadWorld, is nearing its March 10 release date and we're rounding out our coverage with a few more stories before we deliver our final verdict on the title. Readers can look forward to a detailed look at a single level before the end of the week, but today we've got a Q&A with developer Platinum Games' executive producer, Atsushi Inaba. These questions were submitted via Platinum Games' IGN blog by readers like yourself. We've also posted a handful of new screens from MadWorld's unique zombie-filled castle stage.

Q: After watching gameplay and trailers, and seeing how amazing the art direction is, I can't help but wonder what process Platinum Games went through in order to ensure that the game world was clear and discernible. It strikes me as an incredible feat considering the monochrome color palate (save red blood and gore) and the level of detail in the world and characters.

Atsushi Inaba: Making impactful graphics is always one of the important themes of our game development. And with MW, I believe that we could publish the new style of the graphic. Though, to develop this new style, we had a very hard and challenging time. For the detailed process that we went through please check the MW team lead designer's blog.

Q: How did the concept come about? How did publishers respond to a game like this being made on the Wii? Were many publishers willing or hesitant to pick this game up?

Atsushi Inaba: The very first concept of this project was to make something fun on Wii, because we had been interested in Wii hardware. In addition to this, we wanted to make something very unique among Wii titles. When you develop original titles, there are not many things that can be done at the planning stage, so you have to search for the best direction of the game during the project. We had numerous twists and curves in this MW project, so publishers might have a hard time to make a decision. Although after we had decided to use the current graphic concept, they gave us a very good response, and we think this is because the concepts we had ("Something fun on Wii" & "very original title in the Wii market") are welcomed by them.

Q: How do you think the public is going to respond to MadWorld? Do you feel that the game will have a tough time trying to sell in the market or will it sell to your expectations? Does seeing the amount of excitement expressed towards MadWorld put more pressure on the team than there already is?

Atsushi Inaba: The only thing that I could say is that we hope that this game will be accepted by people as much as possible. And we usually feel a lot of pressure just before the release of the original titles like this time. MadWorld had a lot of feedback since this game was unveiled to the public, and we had some pressures and also lot of energy from them. We engage this industry because we all want to hear user's opinions, so I think this kind of pressure are great gift for us.

Q: Did you choose the black, white, and red color scheme due to the Wii's hardware limitations, or just to have a interesting looking game?

Atsushi Inaba: We chose this graphic style not because of the Wii hardware limitations. There are a couple of reasons for this White-Black concept. One of them is to develop the eye-catching graphics -- graphics that attract people without being animated. We wanted the graphics to be so attractive that when you are flipping through a magazine and come to see a MW page, you will not keep your eyes off it. We believe the MW became something like this.

Q: At any point during development did you come up with an execution that was so wonderfully brutal, revolting, outrageous, vile, crude, offensive, disgusting, blood-tastic, etc, that you stopped yourself and questioned if it was possible to put this in to the game?

Atsushi Inaba: At the planning stages we had many interesting ideas, but when we really think about integrating these, there were many difficulties, i.e. this is OK in some countries but not in other countries as of the difference in concept. In this game we didn't want to make a difference among each country except for the localization part. It is not our intended game concept that there are mild and extreme versions of this game depending on the different countries. What we wanted to express with this game is humor with the violence. We are not saying yes to all the violent expression. So we also have the negative opinions to the violence in the real world like them and this game's concept is different from realistic violent games and we did not want the people to misunderstand. We wanted to create the violent game with humor and claim this violence is only for the virtual world.